I think the main reason for me is how fake they are. It talks about the prime of the movies, and if you look at it thats when stupid visual effects were "cool" to people.

I mean you have people flying through the air and doing things you know are not possible at all. I'm not saying giant robots are "realistic" but they try to ground it by doing something to make it seem real. I've never seen a martial arts movie that felt that way, even Mortal Kombat has me giggling when they start fighting.

... when the western publishers have never ever treated the genre with ANY kind of respect in the first place.

Here in the west, most of these movies were only shown to us in a completely butchered and raped way.

The movies are often cut up. They are often dubbed with ridiculously bad voice-actors who camp it up. Often, the little plot that's left after important scenes have been cut out, are crapped on because the new dub has to fit the movement of the mouths, meaning often they come up with ridiculous lines instead of a true translation what's being said in the original scene.

Etc etc etc.

And that's even part of the problem. Not only were these movies completely butchered and raped. They were also very often very poorly marketed. Often no marketing at all, many of the movies going straight to video, in poor quality (pan and scan, scratchmarks, poor sound, etc etc), horrible coverart, etc.

So yeah, ofcourse the genre is looked down upon, because even the people who sell it to us look down on those movies, and they obviously look down upon it's target demographic ("Ooooh, they wouldn't want to read subs! Lets dub it!!!" "Ooooh they couldn't sit through 100 minutes of storyline and plot and all that nonsense! Let's cut out all the talky-talky boring stuff and just leave the fights!!! They'll love that!!! "Ooohhhh this soundtrack is too foreign! Let's replace it with some JayZ!!!")

It's ridiculous.

Even when Kurosawa's movies first came out in the west, they were cut up.

There are a lot of great gems in this genre, but the average mainstream filmfan has been used to being served up CRAP.

I have to agree with you. I like the idea of disrespect too, that can be said about a lot of different types of movies. It seems like they are doing it because they have to, and not that they want to.

I saw a film with my friend that had the original imported version, it had subs instead of dubs, and it was actually really good. It had a REALLY LONG story to it, but it made the fighting seem a lot better to me because we knew a little more. I think the movie was literally like 5 hours long, no joke lol, but we couldn't stop watching.

There are a lot of great martial arts movies that are based on historical figures, (see Ip Man), but those kind of movies wouldn't appeal to many people in say the United States since it's a niche genre here. The Raid Redemption was awesome, but again, those types of movies don't appeal to many.